your spirit restricted.”
“Your job isn’t to protect me,” Ziel said. “It’s to protect them.” He kept his arms out.
The Patriarch must have been confused, but he kept his expression blank as he slid the halfsilver rings over Ziel’s wrists.
Ziel grunted in discomfort as the scripts in the rings activated, restricting his madra.
They weren’t cuffs. He could throw them off if he wanted. They were surely designed to be tied in place somehow, but the gesture was what was important, not the actual effect on his spirit.
“This is not necessary,” the Kazan Patriarch said. “I intend to hear you out in good faith.”
“Yeah, well, I skipped a step. We’re not here to hurt you or take anything. I’m going to lay out the situation for you, and if you don’t like what I have to say, we’ll turn around and leave.”
The Patriarch’s eyes flicked to the Akura Truegold, who looked like she was having trouble keeping her hand away from the long knife at her belt. “Your people said you came to warn us.”
Ziel jerked his head toward the stone wall. “You can feel it yourself. There’s a monster coming.” These people were earth artists; they would have sensed the Titan coming, even if they didn’t know what caused it.
“It’s called a Dreadgod, and we expect it to arrive in a matter of days. When it gets here, everybody in the valley is dead. We have cloudships to take you all to safety, but if you want to take your chances, that’s up to you.”
Ziel stopped to take another swig from his bottle. “That’s it. If you don’t trust us, you should still leave on your own.”
He sensed another presence coming closer, creeping along the edges of the wall. It was only at the Foundation stage, so he ignored it.
“Our defenses are strong,” the Kazan Patriarch said, and he didn’t sound overly proud. He was simply stating a fact. “We had planned to retreat into our strongholds and withstand the coming storm.”
“These strongholds. They’re underground, aren’t they?”
The Patriarch didn’t say anything, but his wife twitched.
“This Dreadgod can eat entire mountains,” Ziel said. “Hope you’ve got some good scripts.”
With that, he looked down to his side, where the Foundation presence had reappeared. Dark, glittering eyes regarded his cloud in awe.
It was a child. A little boy.
The Patriarch’s wife took in a breath. “Maret! Forgiveness, please, I’ll take him!”
She rushed over as the boy grabbed onto Ziel’s Thousand-Mile Cloud, pulling his tiny body up. Ziel dismissed him.
“He’s fine. He won’t hurt himself.”
The boy’s mother froze. She seemed to be holding herself back from snatching up her son. Ziel understood that; you never knew what would set off strange, possibly hostile sacred artists. If she expressed a lack of trust in him, then as far as she knew, he might become enraged at the disrespect and attack.
He let out a sigh. “I would never lower myself to harm a child. But if it would put you at ease, by all means take him.”
The cloud bobbed beneath him as Maret jumped up and down, giggling at the springy cloud madra.
She looked somewhat relieved and bowed. “This one is…certain that he can come to no harm under your watch, so long as he is not giving offense.”
Ziel had actually been hoping she would take the child back, but it was too much effort to clarify. He just pretended not to notice the boy jumping up and down behind him.
The Patriarch cleared his throat. “Pardon us. Our littlest one is a…curious child. I should have scanned for him when the others left the room.”
Judging by the clumsiness Ziel had seen from the Jades here, his scan would have been slightly less useful than just glancing around with his eyes.
Tiny fists grabbed handfuls of Ziel’s hair, but it would take hundreds of pounds more weight to free even one of Ziel’s hairs. He pushed the boy to the back of his mind and continued.
“If you come with us, we can help you evacuate. We hope that you will be able to return soon, and that your homes will be intact. But if not…well, there is no replacing human lives.”
“Forgiveness, but if you don’t know how much destruction this Dreadgod will cause, then how much danger are we in?”
That slipped in through the cracks in Ziel’s heart, finding an unexpectedly tender place.
He had spoken those words, or ones very similar, years ago upon finding out that the Weeping Dragon was approaching. He’d known all about the Dreadgods, of course,